Ben Morris stands next to the espresso stand he owns near Seaside, Ore., on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006. The stand avoided the fall of a 60-foot tree during the storm. As an aside, I have purchased a latte from this espresso stand when I was out birding. They had decent coffee, especially in the opinion of a freezing birder from Seattle (me), so I hope they survive this setback.
Image: Lori Assa, AP/The Daily Astorian.
Wow, I thought I was having some mighty rough times, but the Pacific Northwest has also had more than its fair share of rough times recently. First, a snowstorm and then, last night, a killer blizzard. So how are all my friends in Western Washington and Oregon states doing right now? How about my friends across the border in British Columbia? Are all the floating bridges still intact? I remember standing on shore in a huge windstorm, watching the I-90 (Lacey V. Murrow) floating bridge sinking into the the depths of Lake Washington during another such storm during Thanksgiving in 1990.
Give a shout out here or send me email when you get electricity restored. I would also be happy to share with your fellow readers any pictures that you've taken, and I would be very interested to know if you've seen any unusual birds.
What am I talking about??
A deadly wind storm blasted through Western Washington, claiming three lives, closing major bridges and knocking out power to 1 million homes and businesses. At 5 am, Puget Sound Energy reported that approximately 700,000 people were without power. At 630 am, Seattle City Light said it had 171,000 customers without power. And half their feeder lines are down.
"If it's not the largest outage (in our history), it's close to it," said spokeswoman Suzanne Hartman.
I am grateful to be on the abnormally temperate East Coast right now.
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I live in South Beach Oregon (central Oregon coast), we had winds at 100+ mph, I didn't even lose power. My new gate latch failed but that was it. Our utility is pretty good at keeping things up to snuff here as we have serious storms off the ocean pretty often, it's one of the events people inland come to see.
I'm in Seattle.
Power is out on the Eastside and almost everywhere except Seattle proper north of the canal. Even rich neighborhoods are in the dark. There are more whole trees down than I've ever seen, not just branches. In an ironic twist, all the broken trees have given the whole town a lovely cedar-spruce Christmasy smell.
The 520 bridge is closed (the drawspan was damaged when they opened it to avoid damage). Most businesses and all of the schools are closed.
It's been an adventure. I'm sure people will be telling stories of how they survived the great blow of ought-six, even though most survived by staying home.
Unfortunately, I work at a business that is open and I have a cross-lake commute. When we got a generator running the first thing we hooked up was the coffee maker. Our Seattle values are intact.
I was lucky enough to fly out of Seattle mere hours before all this went down. It's crazy to be watching from far, far away and trying to figure out if everything's okay back home.
Hey Hedwig,
I'm in Seattle, too. We didn't lose power, but man was that storm crazy! It poured rain starting about 4:00 pm Thursday, and I was driving downtown in terrible traffic, so I decided to stop and wait it out - at the Palace Kitchen, and ended up having a lovely evening eating, drinking and reading, I might add. But then, went home and it blew like a mother all night long! I can't believe we didn't lose any trees along the p-patch, and our windows were rattling so loud I woke up at 2 am and couldn't go back to sleep. I hope you are doing well...are you out yet? drop me a line....
We read to each other by candle light as the wind howled outside.
Down the road a bit (I live on the WA side of the Columbia River) are a couple power poles that have new wire and insulators on top while hanging in mid-air are the old wires still attached to the insulators and the sawed-off previous tops of the poles. Guess the linemen didn't have time to do much more than string new wire. There are a few traffic cones placed next to the poles to keep people away.
Haen't seen much unusual bird-wise with this storm. In 1996 we had a huge flood here which scoured out the creeks. A couple days later I saw dippers foraging on lawns. The flood torrents had evidently swept all the bugs from the streams leaving the poor dippers with nothing to eat.
Maybe God is sending a message to the Discovery Institute, which is in Seattle.
Things are slowly getting restored - there are still about 20K without power in the Ranier Valley and in some other neighborhoods in Seattle. The Eastside is comping up more slowly, some may be without power for a few days yet.
We are just north of the Seattle city limits and had a snag come down, though it missed any houses. It took out a section of our fence, and we'll have to cut it up and remove part of it from the neighbor's yard. The neighbor had a snag that came down in wind a day earlier - that one, which I have been watching a pileated woodpecker work on for a month or so now, fell on a section of power line, and a power crew had to come cut it off the line on Wednesday. On Friday morning, I noticed the pileated right back at the part still standing, updating his earlier handiwork. We have had downy and hairy woodpeckers in our yard, but never a pileated so close until this year. I just hope he doesn't chase our pair of flickers out of their nesting tree, another snag with the crown snapped off.
power was restored at casa de travelgirl in sammamish yesterday afternoon, only 3.5 days after it went out... not bad, considering the cold is only getting colder... :)